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Reports: Jets were almost part of Draft Day movie

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The Jets were close to being part of the movie Draft Day. The film's director says the Jets' QB controversy caused them to pull out. The Jets say the film was going to be far too negative about the team's fans.
(Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

Draft Day, which opens this weekend, stars Kevin Costner as the fictional general manager of the real-life-but-fictionalized Cleveland Browns. But according to the Los Angeles Times, the Jets were going to figure prominently in the movie until just before it began shooting last spring.

The reason they're not? Depends on whether you ask director Ivan Reitman or the Jets.

Part of Draft Day's story was to involve the Browns swinging a trade with the Jets for the first overall pick, thus allowing the Browns to select the quarterback they had coveted. But several days before filming was scheduled during the 2013 draft, Reitman and the Jets parted ways.

The Jets, it turned out, were undergoing some drama not unlike that in the script -- the team had a new general manager in John Idzik, and then-quarterback Mark Sanchez looked like he could be getting shunted aside for what wound up being the team's top draft pick that year, West Virginia quarterback Geno Smith.

“They were having something of a quarterback dispute, and the team said that this is just going to incite our fans a little more to criticize us, even though it’s all fictional,” Reitman said.

A Jets source, meanwhile, told ESPN New York's Rich Cimini the team was open to being a part of the project, but that the film wanted to portray Jets fans with such negativity the team suggested some script changes, only to be told by that point the filmmakers had moved on.